Humanity with AI can do better than Feudalism, Slavery, and Subscriptions

For most of recorded history, work has been the price of survival. But the terms of that bargain; who works, for whom, and on what conditions, have changed radically and sometimes violently throughout recorded history. If yesterday’s economy chained people to land (feudalism) and later to owners (slavery), today’s economy increasingly binds livelihoods to platforms, data, and (algorithms). Can’t our species do better than defining someone’s existence by their economic output or financial success?

The next frontier is already in progress with automation and the push towards AGI. Capitalism’s continuous push for lower costs and higher profits threatens to rip income and meaning from work altogether while also trying to shift human consumption from ownership to subscription. The question for the generations alive today is whether we thoughtfully design a transition or let dignity, agency, and broad prosperity become historical footnotes. If we leave this decision up to big tech and the oligarchs, we know what they’ll choose. Let’s learn from the past so we don’t repeat it.

I. Feudalism

Feudalism in Medieval Europe organized production through obligation. Serfs were “unfree” peasants tied to an estate; they owed labor, rents in kind, and loyalty to a lord in exchange for protection and access to land.
serf /sərf/ noun (historical context) - An agricultural laborer bound under the feudal system to work on their lord's estate.

There was no labor market in any modern sense - no competitive wage, little mobility, and scant recourse against abuse. Human dignity was circumscribed by birth; social status, not individual capability, determined the boundaries of a life. Even when feudalism frayed through plague, peasant revolts, commutations of labor dues into money payments its logic persisted: hierarchy first, subsistence second, choice last.

II. Slavery

Where feudalism bound people to land, slavery turned people themselves into capital. As sad as it is to realize, the reality is that only 75 years ago (1954 Brown vs. Board of Education) we still had segregated schools and 175 years ago (1865 - 13th amendment abolished slavery) we still treated humans as property, as a means to produce goods and services. That may seem like an extremely distant past but for the oldest alive today they may have only been removed from those situations by just a few generations. The United States was built with enslaved Africans and their descendants who were treated as assets to be bought, sold, collateralized, and brutally exploited for plantation profits. It was not merely an immoral labor system; it was an unethical stain on humanity’s past. In the mind of a capitalist though, it maximized output by annihilating humanity. In the genealogy of work, slavery was the negation of dignity: not “you are what you do,” but “you are what we own.”

The lasting effects of slavery like legal apartheid, racialized labor markets, and racial wealth gaps survive long after the technical abolishment of slavery. We still have so far to travel but as MLK Jr. once pronounced "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," a powerful reminder that while progress towards fairness takes time, it ultimately moves in that direction, often by means of human effort.

III. Wage Work

The Industrial Revolution was indeed a turning point for the world. Capitalism replaced status and bondage to labor with a contract and wage, unlocking extraordinary growth. People could, in principle, sell their labor to the highest bidder. But the early factory floor reproduced feudal and slave logics in milder form: long hours, child labor, dangerous conditions, company scrip, and housing tied to employers. Dignity advanced only when counterweights such as unions, public education, safety laws, social pressure made contracts something more than “your money or your life.” Think of the 1920’s armed insurrection of coal miners (Battle of Blair Mountain) where just over a 100 years ago there was no such thing as the weekend, or an 8 hour workday. As mentioned, basic respect and dignity must continually be protected and cherished. Otherwise capitalism will move back in the opposite direction in the name of greater and greater profits!

This progress for labor protection and rights along with the New Deal compromises and postwar social settlements in many countries created a new bargain: productivity gains would finance rising wages; ownership would be democratized through pensions and home equity; and a middle class would consume what it produced. Dignity became a mass possibility. Yet as you will continue to see below, the wages didn’t keep up with the productivity gains - if it had, we’d already be near a $20 an hour minimum wage.

IV. Platforms and the Data Factory

Over the last forty years, the ground shifted in reverse again. Globalization, deregulation, mergers or acquisitions, and digitization created concentrated markets with MONOPOLISTIC corporate power. The move towards franchises, subcontractors, temp agencies, and gig platforms more recently displace responsibility down the chain. Workers became “independent contractors” in name, algorithmically managed employees in practice. Data, the exhaust of life and leisure turned into a hidden input that big tech collects and monetizes.

This stage preserves the appearance of free choice—flexibility, self-employment—while often stripping workers of benefits, bargaining power, and predictable income. Dignity is reframed as the right to rate your delivery driver rather than your right to stability, voice, and a fair share.

We must awaken from our collective slumber and realize social media’s core business model turns people into the product. The platforms collect detailed behavioral data like what you click, hover over, pause on, re-watch, or even type and delete and bundle those signals into profiles sold to advertisers as “targeting.” Your attention becomes the inventory; your data becomes the ad buyer’s map. Data is enriched with third-party sources and machine-learned inferences (interests, mood, propensity to buy), enabling micro-targeted ads priced by how precisely you can be reached and nudged.

Your name. Your location. Your shopping habits. Your political leanings. Your health status. Your voice. Your face. Your keystrokes. Every day, corporations vacuum up terabytes of your personal data—not to serve you better, but to sell you, shape you, and control you.

To maximize that inventory, platforms constantly experiment to keep you online. They A/B test headlines, thumbnails, and layouts; tweak ranking algorithms to favor content that spikes watch time, comments, or reshares; and deploy design patterns like infinite scroll, autoplay, variable-reward notifications, and streaks. These systems optimize for engagement over well-being, because outrage, novelty, and social comparison are reliably “sticky.” The result is a feedback loop: the more reactive the content, the more it’s promoted; the more it’s promoted, the more time you spend; the more time you spend, the richer the profile and the more valuable the ads.

Not only did Big Tech and the Social Media giants crack this but at the same time Wall Street, the Banking and Insurance industries were undergoing seismic change from deregulation. Having not learned from the past failures and greed of capitalist before them, the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, was passed. (Pub. L. 106–102 (text) (PDF), 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999) is an Act of the 106th United States Congress (1999–2001).

The GLBA repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies, and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. With the passage of the GBLA, commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies were allowed to consolidate. Furthermore, it failed to give to the SEC or any other financial regulatory agency the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies.[1] The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.[2]

V. From Owning to Renting Life

Humans typically have cherished possessions that they own, or dream of one day having it displayed prominently in their home. Possibly something that took them a decade or more of hard work to save up for and have as their own. But that is changing, corporate America wants us to rent life instead of owning it. AI is only going to make this problem worse, maybe you have already seen some of this morphing across your day to day:

1. Subscriptions and “as-a-service” replace one-time purchases: software, media, razors, cars, even home appliances become monthly fees.

2. Locks and loaders: digital rights management and proprietary ecosystems make repair, resale, or switching costly. Think of propriety software, patented seeds, equipment that can only be repaired by the dealership.

3. Data tethering: products degrade or disappear without server-side authorization; your “purchase” depends on a company’s ongoing consent.

The result is subtle but profound: less autonomy in consumption (you rent access to rather than own the tools), higher lifetime costs, and recurring dependence on corporate terms that can change without your knowledge or consent. For households already squeezed by less than steady incomes, living on subscriptions is like living on the edge of a treadmill.

VI. What’s at Stake?

1. Basic human dignity
   Dignity requires more than survival; it requires agency—the ability to refuse bad deals, plan a future, care for family, and participate as an equal citizen. When society is driven by a negative impact algorithms or on-demand piecework, dignity in professional work and career begins to erode.

2. Ability to afford goods and services
   If automation lowers average costs but concentrates income, affordability becomes a math problem without a solution: cheap things, empty wallets. The economy can produce abundance while households live scarcity.

3. Civic health
   Work has been a social glue—where people meet, collaborate, and build solidarity. The new reality that big tech and corporate America is pushing fragments this glue. Subscription life channels everything through a private gatekeeper. When fewer people feel economically secure, anger grows, and democratic attention migrates from long-term public goods to short-term survival.

VII. Intentional Humane Transition

A new reality is arriving: machines that substitute not just muscle but mind. Industrial robots already outpace humans in repeatable tasks; machine learning now drafts emails, analyzes images, writes code, and designs parts. Two forces drive displacement:

1. Task-level substitution: AI picks off specific tasks inside jobs (document review, quality control, scheduling), compressing headcount without eliminating roles outright—until the residue of tasks can be recombined into fewer jobs.

2. Scale-without-labor business models: Software-first firms can serve millions with marginal staffing—usage grows, but payroll barely does.

Historically, as technology has created new tasks and industries; average living standards rose. The risk now is both joblessness and decoupling of wages as a means to pay for the standard cost of living. AI’s increased productivity and profits will soar while jobs get replaced, median wages stagnate, and the distribution of gains concentrates at the top. Without redesign, we’re headed for chaos. Nothing about the next economy is predetermined. We can encode human dignity into its architecture and design it to reflect the best of humanity, not the greedy worst of it. This is not an exact prescription but rather a broad umbrella of what the US can reach for. A few suggestions:

1) Make income less hostage to a job. Universal basic services (healthcare, childcare, transit, broadband) cut the cash you need to live. Earnings insurance and portable benefits follow the person across gigs and employers. Pilot dividends from data and AI productivity—shared returns funded by a small levy on large-scale AI deployments and cloud rents.

2) Give workers power where they stand. Federal collective bargaining and wage boards set floors in industries where local organizing is hard. Co-determination and employee ownership put worker voice in governance and share the upside of automation. Enforce transparency: explainable scheduling, pay calculation, and performance decisions; independent audits for bias and wage theft.

3) Tax where the surplus lives. Modernize excess-profits and monopoly taxes; align global minimums to stop profit shifting. Treat buybacks and mega-distributions as signals to share gains with workers and the public that enabled them.

4) Restore real ownership for consumers. Enact right-to-repair and interoperability mandates; treat DRM abuses as unfair trade practices. Require offline functionality or escrowed keys for essential goods; if a service is discontinued, users get tools to unlock and migrate.

5) Aim automation at complementing people, not replacing them. Tie public procurement and tax credits to human-complementary adoption—AI that augments care workers, teachers, technicians—paired with paid upskilling. Fund apprenticeships and technical high schools that treat modern craft—robot tech, HVAC, precision machining, elder care—as high-status careers.

6) Measure what matters. Supplement GDP with national dashboards for median income growth, household cost burdens, time sovereignty (predictable schedules), and reparability—because what we measure, we manage.

VIII. The Choice in Front of Us

We have traveled from lords and masters to contracts and code. Feudalism denied mobility; slavery denied humanity; the platform age risks denying agency—the practical freedom to make plans and hold power to account. Automation and AI can either free us from drudgery or free capital from paying for labor. Subscriptions can either smooth access or sentence families to perpetual rent.

History’s lesson is not that progress is inevitable. It’s that progress is designed—through rules that balance innovation with equity, and through institutions that insist prosperity be shared. The future of work should not be a museum of old coercions dressed in new interfaces. It can be a commons of capability, where technology lifts human dignity rather than pricing it.

We still get to choose. In my opinion, this version of corrupt capitalism has run its course. Let’s move towards a better system that protects human dignity. We’ve done it before by moving away from systems like slavery and feudalism, we can do it again.